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Thursday, June 24, 2010

What if I told you that the world’s hands-down most sparkly vampire, Robert Pattinson, who plays Edward Cullen in The Twilight Saga, was actually related to the real Dracula, Vlad the Impaler?

Well, that’s precisely what genealogy experts from Ancestry.com discovered in a recent test of the actor’s family tree. You see, Pattinson is actually related to the British royal family, and is in fact distant cousins to Prince William and Prince Harry. This now connects Transylvania’s Vlad the Impaler (real name Vlad Tepes), as a distant uncle to all of them.

This is actually pretty fitting (and maybe a little curious). As we’ve reported: Twilight studio Summit Entertainment is also developing a movie based on the life of Vlad the Impaler, which at one point sounded like it would focus on the vampire story, and then was revealed to be more of a biopic. We had a little fun with the two totally different properties, making this new family reunion both ironic and entertaining all the same.

Here’s what genealogist Anastasia Tyler had to say about the amusing announcement:

Tracing Pattinson’s family back to Vlad was difficult research, but the pieces that unraveled created the perfect accompaniment to the Twilight Saga. Without any myth or magic, we find royalty and vampires lurking in Pattinson’s life — making his story just as supernatural as the one he’s playing on screen.

Vlad the Impaler is infamous due to his incredibly violent ways of dealing with things, especially his enemies in the war with the Ottomans. One of his preferred methods of torture and execution involved impaling those who stood against him onto stakes. Due to this dark and gruesome method of ruling, war, and execution, it was he who was the inspiration for the title character of the 1897 Bram Stoker novel, Dracula, which has been used in association ever since, and propelled his name into pop culture forever.